


Sacraments

by CaughtAGhost



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bridge Between CATWS to CACW, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes-centric, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Identity, Identity Issues, People Watching, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Discovery, Speculation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-11-18 17:16:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11295135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaughtAGhost/pseuds/CaughtAGhost
Summary: 'Most startling of all is that when he looks at the man’s bloodied, martyred face, his mind provides a name.'In which the Soldier saves Steve at the river and wants to know why. A reckoning with the self. An exploration of identity and connection to humanity, through the lens of a person remembering how to be a person, and falling in love with single man from afar, while falling in love with man as a whole.*Bridges CATWS to CACW, WIP*





	Sacraments

01\. Mythologies (and other useless things)

 

Most startling of all is that when the Soldier looks at the man’s bloodied, martyred face, his mind provides a name: Steve. This has never happened before. He knows no man, and his knowledge of Steve transcends comprehension.

The Soldier leaves Steve at the edge of the river, waterlogged and still on the muddy bank like a bloated corpse. He checks for breath; a whistling whisper from the nose, a sluggish pulse. He will recover quickly. He will survive. Most importantly, the Soldier cannot stay, so it’s fortunate that Steve doesn’t require resuscitation. (He does not know how to resuscitate, how to bring back. His work tends the other way.)

The Soldier  brings brought his victims to the river to drown. The ferryman Charon, from the Greeks, shuttling souls along the one way trip across the river— _you in the back, settle down, you’re rocking the boat_ — and emotionlessly holding heads beneath unforgiving waters. This is his first time saving a life. And at a river. How poetic. He isn’t sure how he remembers the old myths, but they, and other volumes of useless, non-personal information, buzz around his head like flies. Distractions. Of course fate would have it that he would possess the details of arcane mythologies, but not his own identity, not his foundations, not why he gives a damn about Steve.

(The Fates three were known for their ironic cruelty.)

He cannot stay. He cannot be there when the Captain wakes up.

 

*

 

The Soldier bleeds from bullet holes in a rattling cargo train. It feels familiar. Having escaped the suffocating population of the city, (every eye is his enemy), the Soldier jumped a train car in the hills of Virginia and rode with no destination nestled amongst tied down crates of coal mining equipment. How appropriate; he  ~~is~~ was a piece of equipment, after all. 

The wounds don’t seem to want to heal. His tactical gear clings to the edges of the bullet holes, tacky with dark, half dried blood. He requires maintenance that is performed post-mission, normally. However, the Soldier is adaptable above all else because You Never Know What Might Happen In The Field, and the best tool— the best weapon— is always the one with different attachable functions. Swiss army knife, Soviet brainwashed soldier, same thing, really. He digs the bullets out of his flesh with his fingers and one rolls off the cart, flying off the train and falling abandoned somewhere along the track.

That feels familiar as well.

The moon stares him in the eye, unblinking and unmoving in the center of the empty sky from across miles of mindless fields of yellow, waving grass. He falls asleep with his head resting against the jostling crate behind him, and jumps the train in the morning as it rolls through a sleepy village at dawn, when the sky is blush pink and new. He sheds his bloodied tactical clothes behind a barn and steals a flannel button-up and jeans from someone’s backpack in an unlocked car in the driveway.

The wounds began to knit together while he slept, but they throb and ache still. He is pleased to see that the bleeding has slowed to a manageable ooze, and he even finds cloth to wrap around his torso so not to ruin his new civilian clothes.

The town begins to wake up, and despite his oily hair and dirty face and hands, he does not stand out. This is a farm town on the edge of coal country, and everyone shares his unshaven, tired, unclean expression. He walks invisible amongst real people, and he feels like he’s getting away with something.

The thrill of going unnoticed on the sidewalk makes something tighten in his chest, and he is giddy with it. He gave up on the ridiculous notion of grieving himself decades ago, but once there was a time when the Soldier despaired that the world had forgotten him. It doesn’t matter anymore because he doesn’t really feel as though there is anything to remember. He’s a ghost, on a different frequency than the world, wandering.

Is he wandering, or running?

Either way, he does not know where he is going, and he cannot stop. Stagnancy will ruin him.

“Sit anywhere you like, sugar,” the hostess says when the Soldier enters a diner that advertises Good Breakfast and Coffee Fifty Cents on a chalkboard sign propped against the front door. He doesn’t flinch at jingling door bell when it closes behind him, and he chooses to sit at the bar along the wall, with an eye on the exit. A few truck drivers sit on the opposite end of the bar, five stools away from the Soldier.

_"My route’s delayed on accounta all that chaos up in DC, I diddin know what to tell Margaret.”_

_"Garden show’s this week, hardly think she’ll notice, Rick, I tell yuh.”_

_“Same old thing, the government’s always coverin’ things up, I tell you, is probably a September Eleventh all ova again.”_

_“Always with the politics, Joe, Jesus Christ on a cracker, can’t I have my breakfast in peace?”_

_“Hush now— be a dear, Greta and warm up my coffee, will ya? Thanks sweetheart.”_

The Soldier listens to what real people sound like. The diner has cork board on the walls covered in drooping fliers attached by thumb tacks, and a black and white checkered floor. The table cloths on the dining tables are checkered as well, red and white, as if carved and woven from an American flag. The Soldier thinks that America is strange in that the country devours itself by its obsession with its identity as American. Paradoxical and sad; he sees the boasted flag of greatness stained with ketchup and coal dust and sewn into the worn thin work shirts of the bone tired blue collar class, beaten into submission from birth.

The Soldier was sometimes referred to as “The American” in the laboratory, so he knows that this is his home, or at least the nation of origin of his physical being. Mentally, he has no ties and finds the customs and culture shocking.

Between that, and the fact that he was last seen in the states, he decides that he will try to get to another continent as soon as possible.

“What can I get for ya, dear?” the woman referred to as Greta asks. The soldier is startled, (which in and of itself is startling, that he was able to be startled. He is meant to be alert, and it frightens him to feel vulnerable.) The metal hand grips the counter’s edge suddenly and it creaks and splinters. His face feels hot.

Greta makes a sympathetic face and clicks her tongue, pouring black coffee into a chipped white cup, unfazed. “Poor soul, lost it in the mine, or oversea? Happened to my grand son two years back when the west tunnel blew, but he still hasn’t got any compensation, hasn’t got any fancy fake like you got there. It’s a damn shame they can get away with that, ain’t it? Lord knows we’re good folk around here,” she says. The Soldier is relieved. He agrees with her, although he doesn’t know what she’s talking about at all.

“Yeah, uh. Mine,” he says, tucking his hands into his lap.

“What’s your name, son?” she asks, returning the dingy glass pot to the warmer behind the counter to keep the coffee hot. She pushes the white cup toward the Soldier, and he looks down into it. The reflection of what he supposes is his face gazes back up at him, swimming in the oily surface of the coffee.

What is his name?

Steve had called him Bucky. The Soldier won’t call himself that. He hasn’t deciphered the enigma of Steve yet, though, and it seems somehow wrong to call himself Steve’s name for him. Sacrilegious. He doesn’t really know any names, not any American ones, anyways.

“I’m Steve,” he says. It comes out without much thought.

“God bless you, Steve. Coffee’s on the house,” she says. The Soldier doesn’t know how to show gratitude or how to interact with people. He had expected to want to be left alone, but he finds himself dreading the end of this silly interaction, desperate for the contact. He is intrigued by her.

“Thank you.” She smiles, mauve painted tips stretched over missing front teeth, and leaves him alone. The Soldier stares into his coffee cup. There he is.

 _Hello, Bucky,_ he tells himself in his head.

 _Hello, Steve,_ his reflection tells him.

 

Steve was Captain America. The Soldier doesn’t know anything about Steve, so it’s by some unexplainable bias that he thinks that Steve’s America must be very different than what the Soldier has seen. It’s by some unexplainable bias that he believes Steve must believe in a better America, or else maybe he’s stupid.

Coffee is very bitter. It tastes greasy in his mouth, and feels like acid on his teeth. Like red stripes, and God Bless You, and 9/11, the Soldier understands that coffee is another strange facet of American culture. He drinks it to have something in his stomach. The hot liquid quells the hunger cramping in his stomach. He’s grateful for it, and he is suddenly very glad that Greta did _God Bless_ and _On The House_ , because the Soldier has no money and he does not want to steal coffee from Greta. Everyone in this town is very poor.

He watches the truck drivers while he drinks. They talk a lot about very little, and there’s the pattern of routine in the things they say. A rhythm of saying the same things each day in the same order to the same people, the steady meter of “How’s Margaret’s leg, Jim” and “Flaring up but she’s a trooper, she is”, “Sad state of this country that you have to go without”, “Well the healthcare system’s always been shit, Joe”, and quiet, and “Weather’s been steady, ain’t it?”

The Soldier sees a glimpse of a people as a whole. He feels like an alien tourist, and he feels a desperate longing to see more. With the firm sense of being irreversibly an ‘other’, he still wants to experience humanity vicariously. He wants to watch, but he’s frightened of getting too close because he’s frightened of deluding himself into ever believing that he can be more than a fugitive ghost, a voyeur.

 _You’re dangerous, you know, Steve. You could kill Greta right now. You could burn down_ Good Breakfast Coffee 50 Cents _and you could slit Jim and Joe’s throats and snap Margaret’s leg in half and drown her in her own blood and gristle,_ his reflection tells him from the coffee cup. He frowns.

He is afraid of hurting someone.

 _That’s true. What do I do, Bucky?_ he asks his reflection. It wobbles and glistens and says nothing.

This is how the first rule comes about:

Thou Shalt Not Touch.

He remembers bits of the Bible, glass window containing the creation of times, long white robes and taste the flesh and taste the blood and confess your sin, for He Shall Wash You Clean. He doesn’t remember firsthand, of course, but the mythology of it. The mythology of it is there. The Soldier will have commandments for himself, because he is his own handler now, and he can’t function without any rules or guidelines.

Thou Shalt Not Touch, God Bless, and amen.

 


End file.
